Flunky's Upset - Netflix

"None Of This High School Stuff Matters!" is the winning slogan for Flora "Flunky" Hill, the dark horse candidate for student body president.

Flunky's Upset - Netflix

Type: Scripted

Languages: English

Status: Running

Runtime: 8 minutes

Premier: 2017-09-27

Flunky's Upset - Dustin Hoffman - Netflix

Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor and director, with a career in film, television, and theater since 1960. Hoffman has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1980 for Kramer vs. Kramer, and in 1989 for Rain Man. Hoffman first drew critical praise for starring in the play, Eh?, for which he won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. This achievement was soon followed by his breakthrough 1967 film role as Benjamin Braddock, the title character in The Graduate. Since that time, Hoffman's career has largely been focused on the cinema, with sporadic returns to television and to the stage. Hoffman's films include Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Straw Dogs, Papillon, Lenny, Marathon Man, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Hook, and Wag the Dog. He made his directorial debut in 2012, with Quartet. Along with two Academy Award wins, Hoffman has been nominated for five additional Academy Awards, and he was nominated for 13 Golden Globes, winning 6 (including an honorary award). He has won 4 BAFTAs, 3 Drama Desk Awards, 2 Emmy Awards, and a Genie Award. Hoffman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999, and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 2012. In 2016, he won the International Emmy Award for Best Actor for his work on Roald Dahl's Esio Trot.

Flunky's Upset - 1980s: Tootsie, Death of a Salesman, Rain Man, Family Business - Netflix

You can't define Dustin Hoffman, because he's unique. He's one of a kind and he's not one character. There is no Dustin Hoffman. He is many, many people. . . . He can do comedy and he can do drama. He has an enormous range, and yet he's still Dustin somewhere in there. He's intelligent and has a great sense of how to connect with people, because he's very interesting. On a day-to-day basis, he's like an actor who's making his first movie, with the enthusiasm and energy to want to make things happen and try things and experiment.

Fellow actor Gary Oldman reported that, during a telephone conversation with Hoffman, the latter recalled having “said some stuff... to someone who was very powerful” that ensured he was unable to find work in Hollywood for some time following Tootsie. In 1983, Hoffman became a Major Donor for The Mirror Theater Ltd, alongside Paul Newman and Al Pacino, matching a grant from Laurance Rockefeller The men were inspired to invest by their connection with Lee Strasberg, as Lee's then daughter-in-law Sabra Jones was the Founder and Producing Artistic Director of The Mirror. In 1984, Hoffman starred as Willy Loman in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman He reprised his role in a TV movie of the same name, for which he won the 1985 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor along with a Golden Globe. Hoffman first read the play at age 16, but today considers the story much like his own: “It was a blueprint of my family. I was the loser, the flunky, and my brother, a high-school varsity football player, was Biff.” Author Marie Brenner notes that Hoffman “has been obsessed with the play” throughout his career: “For years he has wanted to be Willy Loman; when he discovered that Arthur Miller was his neighbor in Connecticut, they began to talk about it in earnest.” For Hoffman, the story also left a deep emotional impact from the time he first read it:

Next came director Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988), where Hoffman starred as an autistic savant, opposite Tom Cruise. Levinson, Hoffman and Cruise worked for two years on the film, and Hoffman's performance gained him his second Academy Award. Behind Hoffman's motivation for doing the film, he has said, “Deep inside, Rain Man is about how autistic we all are.” In preparation for the part, Hoffman spent two years befriending autistic people, which included taking them bowling and to fast food restaurants. “It fed my obsession,” he has stated. Hoffman worked at the New York Psychiatric Institute, affiliated with Columbia University, when he was 21. “It was a great experience for me,” he said. “All my life I had wanted to get inside a prison or a mental hospital. . . . I wanted to get inside where behavior, human behavior, was so exposed. All the things the rest of us were feeling and stopping up were coming out of these people.” He used that experience to help him develop the character of Raymond Babbitt, a high-functioning autistic savant, yet a person who critic David Denby described as “a strangely shuttered genius.” Hoffman created certain character traits for Raymond. Denby noted: “Hoffman, looking suddenly older and smaller, has developed a small shuffling walk for Raymond, with shoulder bent. His eyes don't make contact with anyone else's, and he flattens his voice to a dry nasal bark.” Rain Man won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hoffman, and Best Director for Barry Levinson. Having worked closely with Hoffman for two years on filming, Levinson offered some opinions about his skill as an actor:

Hoffman rehearsed for three weeks with the play's original star, Lee J. Cobb, and remembers seeing his stage performance: “I'll never forget that period in my life. It was so vivid, so intense, watching Lee J. Cobb and his sixteen-inch guns as Willy. God, how I think about what I saw on that stage!” Brenner adds that Hoffman “has been training like a boxer for the role that so exhausted Cobb he had to be replaced after four months.” The original play was directed by Elia Kazan, who Hoffman considers “the perfect director, the best there ever was. . . . God, I would have done anything to have worked with Kazan.” Hoffman's worst film failure was Elaine May's Ishtar (1987), co-starring Warren Beatty, who also produced it. Hoffman and Beatty play two down-and-out singer-songwriters who travel to Morocco for a nightclub gig and get caught up in foreign intrigue. Much of the movie was filmed in Africa. The film faced severe production problems, mostly related to its $55 million cost, and received overwhelmingly negative reviews. However, Hoffman and Beatty liked the film's final cut and tried to defend it. Hoffman and Beatty were unaffected by the flop, and Ishtar became a cult film. Quentin Tarantino, for one, has called it one of his favorite movies, partly due to the humorous lyrics of the songs written by Paul Williams. Hoffman describes why he loves the film:

I read that play, and I was just destroyed by it. It was like finding out something terrible about my family. I just shook. I felt like my family's privacy had been invaded. I couldn't even talk about it for weeks.

Flunky's Upset - References - Netflix